Meditation and Muay Thai – The Deeper Connection

I’ve introduced meditation into my practice many times. I’m not consistent with it, so usually it’s trying to get 10 minutes per day, or at least 2 minutes before practice, or maybe 5 minutes during an emotionally tumultuous stretch in training. Basically, I just think that quieting your mind and learning how to breathe can’t ever be a bad idea. But I’ve also never done any formal practice with it. I’m a very fair-weather meditator.

Just after my 200th fight – literally the next morning – I woke up and drove myself over to a meditation center in Pattaya, checking myself in for a 3 day meditation retreat. I had nothing with me other than clothes and a journal. I wasn’t allowed to read anything other than the materials on the vipassana meditation practice I’d be undergoing, provided by the monastery. I barely even meditate on my own without an mp3 track, so this was a serious departure from my very-basic familiarity with meditation practices as they were. I was terrified.

The methods and experiences of that 3 days is another blog post, but it’s important to note that vipassana mediation is not about tranquility. It’s not about quieting the mind through perhaps focused breathing and finding temporary calm. Vipassana seems to think that kind of meditation is, more or less, analgesic bullshit. Instead, you are given an object to meditate on, which in the simplest explanation are the physical body (yours) and the conscious mind (also yours). Then you observe those two objects, non-stop, for 3 days, in an effort to excise the belief of “self” from them. What was most profound in my realizations – and there were many – during that time was that this practice felt exactly applicable and beneficial to Muay Thai. To give a brief example: while sweeping the porch of my hut and observing the body just doing this mechanical task, there was an abrupt and intense moment of having escaped what I call the “tyranny of self.” It didn’t matter how I was sweeping the leaves off the side, there was absolutely no judgement to it, something that I have only witnessed glimmers of in my Muay Thai practice, because I criticize and analyze fucking everything about myself and my performance. All in an effort to improve, of course, I’m not just an asshole. But in that moment sweeping leaves, I realized that it didn’t matter really what my intentions were (improvement or whatever), it only mattered how it felt (you can find my thoughts about this at the 6:50 mark in the 2nd day vlog below). In this meditation practice, you have to learn to feel whether the practice is correct or not. Many, many times, for me, it was not correct. I knew I was practicing wrong and that was okay. I said this to the monk in our second meeting, on my 3rd day, and he jumped with delight at the neutrality with which I told him, “sometimes I know my practice is wrong and that’s okay; but I know.” I’ve experienced this with Muay Thai, when I’m laughing with Karuhat because I keep making the same mistake over and over again, or when I flap my arm like a chicken wing to make fun of myself to Chatchai because the punch isn’t coming out straight. I know it’s wrong, and that’s okay because I know. I can self-correct, even if in that time I never actually do it correctly. But I’ve never been able to accomplish this attitude on purpose. This 3 day meditation practice showed me that I can, indeed, learn how to do this on purpose; and with purpose.

above, my vlog from the 2nd day of the retreat – all 8 vlogs will be published in a coming post

So that’s the short version of that experience and what I’m bringing with it (among many other things) to my Muay. But what’s perhaps more interesting is what my Muay brought to the meditation practice. There were countless times that I’d be reading the literature on theory to help me practice (you are never instructed, it’s all through practice and the monk just makes sure you understand and clears things up as you go), I’d understand something through my Muay Thai practice. I’d think, “oh, that’s just like this aspect of Muay,” or in the more esoteric and theoretical approach to dissociating yourself from your body, I’d be like, “oh yeah, I do that all the time.” That part was easy. And when I would explain to the monk that, because of my Muay, I could easily not see physical pain as being me that’s suffering, he seemed super interested in hearing about that connection and always agreed with the connections I was making. In a way, what meditation does for Muay Thai is something I’ll be elaborating on in the future as I give more informal practice to these tools I’ve learned; but what Muay Thai does for meditation, especially this sort vipassana meditation, as a beginner feels immense.

And with that, I realized something pretty incredible, which I may have secretly known all along: my 5.5 years of training and fighting full-time in Thailand, having just accomplished my 200th fight overall, has all been an extensive meditation. Fight after hard-fought fight, endless training sessions one after another, a single, long meditation practice. One of the more terrifying aspects of the vipassana method in retreat, on its surface, is that it doesn’t stop. At all. You observe the body and mind non-stop, every moment, unless you’re asleep. If you wake up in the night to roll over or change position or use the toilet, you observe in those moments that your mind is awake. It never, ever stops. And that, my friends, is what my process in Thailand has been. People ask me (including my trainers) why I train so much; why don’t I rest or take breaks after fights? Why do I fight so much? Or the more maddening inquiry I’ve had in interview: what else do you do?, as if there needs to be something else that is a focus. Fucking nothing, man. All of it is for this, all of it is for Muay. I like to read, but if I’m reading it’s going to help my Muay. I like to run, but I run to be able to do Muay. I don’t have side hobbies or pet projects; only this. Only Muay. To draw the comparison, if you were to meet a monk in the midst of a multi-year meditation quest, you’d never ask him, “what else do you do?” or “Why do you meditate so much?”

A lot of learning is repetition. Kicking 100 kicks before my first round on pads, teeping the bag 300 times, kneeing 500 times, working on the same shoulder rotation and then hook over and over again for rounds at a time. Without purpose, it’s all very boring. I’ve met countless Thai fighters or ex-fighters here in Thailand who recount their days starting out in the gym, before they were even allowed to hit anything, and a ghost of torture possesses their facial expressions as they recall months at a time of doing nothing other than marching and blocking. As kids, they didn’t have the focus and purpose that they have now, as teachers showing these techniques to someone else. Counting out knees on the bag when you’re already tired or shadowboxing again at the end of training when you just want to change your shirt and go home: those are the parts the non-devoted will drop first. There are days when I’m counting out my 1000 elbows and I hate every one of them. I’m bored, just going through the motions but also aware of how piss-poor a lot of those motions are. This is like trying to sit and meditate but all you can think about is what you need to buy at the store for dinner. It’s a waste of time and it makes you feel shitty. But then there are times when every single elbow has its own fingerprint and feeling the minute difference between how my shoulder hit on this one, versus how it grazed by cheek on that one, is mesmerizing. I can feel the pivot of my feet as I switch, there’s power as the shoulders whip through and I feel a surge of energy with every slice, growing excited and calm at the same instant. I’m not thinking about me, I’m just tracking the Muay. That’s the trance state. That’s the expressive, joy state.

In my history, at the end of a round or nearing the finale of an incredibly close fight I can give up on myself. Through a distorted, negative skew I can just feel like whatever it is I’m trying to do isn’t working and I’m down on myself, feeling frustrated and pissed off. The fight is unearthing my deeper fears about myself. My face doesn’t hide these feelings, ever. It’s a terrible feeling and to go through the motions of the rest of the fight through the final round just feels worse. Like having an argument with someone and having to sit next to them in a car for hours, you just can’t get out of the feeling even when the “action” is over. That’s how I lose fights. I’ve never felt this way for instance in a Kard Chuek fight, which is my favorite kind of fighting, and I never feel that way when I’m playing around in the gym. Instead, it feels like a living puzzle is in front of me, a maze that’s moving and solving me while I’m solving it. These fights feel incredible and whether I’m winning or losing doesn’t even register in my mind because I just feel the fight. I lose myself in it – I’m not fighting, the fight just is. It’s the same as those moments in training, when I feel the movements in their detail – probably distinctly because I’m not feeling me in detail. Getting back to that state is something I’d do a million times. This is meditative practice. And then practicing it under repeated pressure and threats of injury, this is a kind of meditative practice.

The conundrum is that losing myself in Muay is what teaches me about myself, and fighting itself plays a big role in it for me. You know that line from Fight Club, “how much can you possibly know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” It’s that, but what can you know about yourself if you’ve only been in a single fight? What can you know about yourself after 50? 200? 500? In my experience in fighting the way I do, at really a record pace, there are things that I realized after 20 fights that I couldn’t realize after 5. If I had stopped at 5 those discoveries would have been lost. There were depths of understanding and shocks of perception after 100 that couldn’t have occurred after 20. I had to climb that mountain to get that view. But that’s me. There are people who may have similar realizations after 4 fights, I don’t know, but those people aren’t me. Some are super calm and feel a life shift from 2 minutes of meditation in the morning, others go on month-long retreats, and still others devote a life. You can’t force the understandings; you can’t anticipate the realizations. What I know about myself after 200 fights can’t even guess at what I might know after 400. And that “self” keeps changing through the process as it is, so I discover at the same time I’m being formed.

When I got home after the 3 days and unloaded to Kevin about some of my experiences, he showed me this short film about monks in Japan who run a marathon, daily, for 7 years. A marathon every day, for 100 consecutive days, for multiple years. There are incredible numbers involved in that, in total miles, total days, distance covered or laps completed on this mountain where the runs take place. But those numbers just help us lay-folk understand the magnitude of the task. They don’t actually mean anything. Just like 200 fights doesn’t mean what the process of 200 fights means. The running is the method, it’s not the purpose. The number of fights are a method, not a purpose; so when people ask me, “what now, after 200?” I stare blankly at what for me is the absurdity of the question. I get it, I know why people ask, because they’re focusing on the maths involved, not the process itself. But those numbers are just to help illustrate the magnitude in short-hand, for those who might not understand otherwise. The numbers aren’t the awe, man… they’re not even the sum of the footsteps involved. So, when I say that I’ve dabbled in meditation, I mean the kind where I’ve put on an mp3 and try to get all tranquil for a few minutes. Try to quiet the mind in a way that consciously feels like I’ve quieted the mind. But when I actually went on a 3 day meditation retreat, something that terrified me on the surface of the task and struck awe in me in the actualization of the process, I realized that in some important sense I’ve been meditating for more than 5 years. One of the most beautiful things to me about what these Japanese monks do is that they stop just short of the 7 years; they never actually fully accomplish the impossible feat they set out to do, so that the rest of their lives can be attempting to fill that tiny space just a breath away from completion. I nodded along to this part of the film, tears in my eyes, outwardly expressing, “fuuuuuck, that is just like my Muay Thai path,” because after 50 I said 100; after 100 I said 200. And after 200, why not 400? It doesn’t matter. The numbers just help one get a grip on it, to even be able to hold the concept in the head. You can understand a monk running a marathon every day, for 100 consecutive days and for 7 years more easily than you can fathom a monk running that exact same amount but with no measurables… just running, seemingly endlessly. One seems amazing, the other seems crazy. But they’re the same thing.

And the same goes for me, even as I undergo this insane process. The monks aren’t overly concerned about how “well” they’re running. That’s not the point. If they were to get all critical and bent out of shape about their running form, it would take them out of the real process – that’s not meditation. In my 3 days of vipassana practice, if I’d worried about doing the practice wrong, I’d have done none of it right. And that’s what I realize about my 5+ year meditation on Muay Thai so far. Fucking let it go. Those moments when I do, when I’m free and I can see that I’m wrong but it doesn’t matter because just knowing will gradually bring it back to right, those are when I’m most balanced. I tried to meditate for my Muay Thai and discovered that Muay Thai is my meditation. And it never stops. Never.

I invite you to think about your own Muay Thai practice in this way.

If you enjoyed this article, you may like this one on how Muay Thai in Thailand, in terms of masculinity, is positioned between Monkhood and Gangsterism:

Related

A 103 lb. (46 kg) female Muay Thai fighter. Originally I trained under Kumron Vaitayanon (Master K) and Kaensak sor. Ploenjit in New Jersey. I then moved to Thailand to train and fight full time in April of 2012, devoting myself to fighting 100 Thai fights, as well as blogging full time. Having surpassed 100 fights in 3 years here, my new goal is to fight an impossible 200 times in Thailand, as much as I possibly can, and to continue to write my experience.

connect with me here

Official Sponsor of 8limbs.Us

Official Sponsor of 8limbs.Us

No Tricks or Combos – Deep Techniques

Featured Posts

We all know the bro (or the female version) who says “Let’s go light” in sparring, and then whacks you. Or, when you get a hit in they suddenly step it up two notches in a way that seems inordinately ego-driven, like they’re trying to “win” at sparring. What’s up with these people? Don’t they know how to spar? It turns out that although there indeed may be all kinds of psychological reasons why people just hit back harder than they are hit – not understanding their own size, or just being a jerk – there also may be a

This piece flowed out of my experiences that led to writing The Fragility of Western Masculinity, and responses to this post lead to me writing Endurance is a Skill. Read All My Articles on Overtraining Preface – I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long while and two things happened recently that have allowed me to finally pull it together. The first thing was writing to Lewis Pugh, who is an incredible athlete and ocean advocate who swims in extreme conditions in order to draw attention to the effects of climate change on the earth’s oceans. (Picture swimming

In the world of athletics and motivational memes, the word “sacrifice” gets thrown around a lot. All the things that one must sacrifice in the name of greatness, the hardships of waking up to train, missing out on nights of drinking with friends… whatever. I know people use this word without truly dissecting the concept, it’s just part of sport-speak. But I don’t use this word because it means a lot to me. When I think of the word “sacrifice” I think of giving up something of immense value – sacrifice is painful, not unfortunate or just hard. Abraham willing

Join and Study my Muay Thai Library of Legends This is a full video of a private I took with Arjan Surat, Head Coach of the Thai National Team, and owner of the esteemed (but lesser known to the west) Dejrat Gym in Bangkok. I did a short review of the gym when I interviewed female fighter Kaitlin Young, and it was then that I met Arjan Surat for the first time: an absolutely extraordinary teacher and life-force of Muay Thai. The man is Old School-Old School, telling me that he’s been holding pads longer than I’ve been alive (he’s

A few months ago I wrote post titled Game Day: Why You Should Fight Muay Thai in Thailand. This is a follow up or “part two” to that post on the subject of how you know when you’re ready to fight, in Thailand or otherwise. When Are You Ready? Not long ago a fellow who I met through my Facebook page and who made it out to Thailand to train at a gym that is also in Chiang Mai came by Lanna to train with us. After a full session including sparring he started talking about how he expected to

[Update May 2015: Here is my account of the Backward Facing Tigers I received next] above video: my thoughts on just coming out from the 2 hrs of tattooing my sak yant. As one can see, I was significantly affected by the experience, but was in good spirits. It is a lot to digest. What This Sak Yant Meant to Me People may not realize it from the fact that I post online and blog, and even sometimes write about very personal things, but I’m an extremely private person. And even though I have probably put more out there about

above, my how to video for warm water massage for shins [update: for longer lasting shin swells you can try this] Subscribe to 8limb.us articles for free here Anyone who has kicked anything knows that the occasional bump, knot or “mouse” on the shin or foot is inevitable. You can get them on your forehead or face from an elbow or punch and on your shins or feet from kicking knees, elbows, heads, etc. They kind of feel like badges of awesomeness, but they can also keep you from training and that feels lame. I always have something that hurts,

Any westerner fighting in Thailand has an interest in portraying their Thai opponents as being the best and fighting at the top of their capabilities. And, to be fair, we assume and hope that this is true in our own minds. We come here to train hard and fight hard, and from our understanding of fighting in the west we assume quite fairly that our opponents are doing the same. But in Thailand, things are very often not what they seem; perhaps especially when gazing with western expectations. My experience of fighting in Thailand started over 5 years ago now

This is a new feature I’m going to try my hand at. I’ve got a lot on my plate out here, but it feels like it would be a shame to waste some of the small technical Muay Thai know-hows I’ve run into, so I’m going to try to stop and film them in short segments when I come across a new one. Sometimes it will be something I’ve discovered in my own struggle to synthesize all the amazing technique that is surrounding me, but mostly I hope it is short pieces of instructions or help from those teaching

Sataanmuanglek Numponthep – Magician A few days a go a clinch video swept across Facebook, featuring the young fighter Sataanmuanglek Numponthep just looking incredible in “man in the middle” training. This kind of training is very common in Thailand, and often can go for 40 minutes or more (rotating out the man who is in the middle) – it’s one of the reasons I moved to Pattaya to train at Petchrungruang, this kind of work. But Sataanmuanglek just looks spectacular in this clip. The very best clinch throw techniques are those where you almost can’t see where the trip came

(above) my video introduction the common fight fears of gassing out and shin pain, the video below shows Den talking about what to do for fight conditioning Some Tough Talk One of the advantages of training non-stop in Thailand for so long is a sense of perspective I’ve gained on people who come with Muay Thai dreams. I’ve met maybe 100 people over the past year and a half who have come through the gym with serious aspirations to fight. They arrive very enthused, but less than a quarter of them actually do fight and none of them – not

Sylvie’s Tips – Muay Thai Techniques

Den Shows the “4” Block A Little Break Down of the “4” Block Den taught me this block a short while ago and it’s also very well utilized by Neung, who is a WBC boxing champion. Basically you use your back arm and fold it across your chin, so your elbow is right at the center to protect your nose and chin and your glove is at the opposite side of your head, protecting your ear and jaw. Then your front arm is the leg of the “4”, shooting straight out to jab or push on your opponent. Den isn’t

Above is a little video of how I wrap my hands. I think it’s good to experiment with different kinds of wrap techniques as they have different strengths. It took me a while to settle on this one. Hand size, punching style, the wrap material itself can make a difference – I’ve been liking the longer, softer wraps of Top King and Punish (an Australian company). This wrap technique incorporates an extra padded layer made of a fold of the wrap placed on the knuckles first (for torn up skin, I’ve actually added a cut kitchen sponge for a few

Just a little bagwork drill/game that I ran into in the gym by one of my favorite young fighters, Jatukam. Jatukam is 14 or 15 years old and just crushes his competition at Lumpinee and Rajadamnern. He’s one of the best fighters at 40 kg (88 lbs) and has a really clever, muay femur style, which is the tricky and evasive style mostly associated in the west with Saenchai. He’s Southpaw and has a nasty teep, but that doesn’t stop him from getting in close and smashing my face with solid left crosses when we spar. He’ll smile the

“Play Knees” – Sylvie’s Tips video above The other day I put up a video of “play knees,” bagwork that Muay Thai legend Sakmongkol taught me at WKO, here in Pattaya. He was displeased with me merely doing counted, repetition knee drills, the traditional Muay Thai camp endless knees on the bag that everyone knows. (These are still good and useful, by the way, just for stamina.) He wanted me to do play knees, to move the bag around in fight simulation action and energy. It was something I’ve never seen before, but I did my best to adopt it.

The real instruction doesn’t come until minute 1:40 but the thought to record Bai jumping in to practice knees with the boys was simply because it was pretty cute. Then her dad came over to correct her form (she was imitating the boys, mostly one who is a few down in the row). Bai is 9 years old and has a few fights; this drill is something all the kids do at the start of training as a warmup and conditioning drill. I’m pretty sure they do a thousand repetitions. As Bai first starts out, her father Goh (who is

I learned a ton training with Sakmongkol in Pattaya for 7 weeks, as well in my time at Petchrungruang Gym. You can see my daily blog posts of my time with Sakmongkol here if you want to dig into the evolution of my lessons, the posts are pretty detailed with lots of video. Below are the lessons I learned, in particular the lessons or techniques I’m going to consciously work into my training at Lanna, now that I’m back in Chiang Mai. I’ll try to tell you why they were important for me and maybe they could help you, too.

I’ve never really had opponents catching my kicks in fights, but that’s partially because I don’t really mid-kick. So, the reason I know that I suck at responding when my kick is caught is almost entirely through padwork, where I topple over like a kicked-over bicycle. Which is to say that I don’t really practice against this and only get reminded of how unpracticed I am when my trainer occasionally wants to mess with me. I do know how to handle the caught kick – I’ve been shown techniques from various sources – but I never drill them. When I visited

Kick Where it Hurts This is another installment of Sylvie’s Tips where I seek to share some of the things my Thai trainers are teaching. The other day Kru Nu landed a couple leg kicks on my right (back) leg during padwork. He’s got a good low kick and his Thai students have really whippy, nasty low kicks as well. The first one hurt and all, but the second one – which was a good 10 minutes after the first – landed on just such the perfect spot, with just enough force, and while my weight was on it that

Sylvie’s Tips: The Floating Block Sakmongkol was the first person to tell me not to turn around on kicks. He was adamant about it. It’s very awkward when you first try and your kick can be really flicky and horrible, but the more you get it under control the more you realize how much this increases power. Basically you want to have confidence that you can control your kick at any time, so if you miss your target you’re not going to spin all the way around. Honestly, you’ll seldom if ever see this in a Thai fight and when

In my Dieselnoi Instruction post I made a video demonstrating some of the different sorts of knees used in Muay Thai. I’m not an expert in any of these, but I felt it might be good to just present an overview as a single, “proper” knee does not so much exist in Muay Thai, and there are many different techniques used for different purposes. Sometimes the focus is damage done, or accumulating points, or even just making sure the knee is clearly visible to the judges. As I say in the introduction to the video, these are all variations on knees and,

n Sylvie’s Tips I try to capture on video various small techniques that I run into while training. The way that it happens in Thailand, things are seldom taught to you in the form of formal instruction, rather they come up suddenly in training and then are gone. I’m pretty shy, so it’s hard actually go around and request these things; I don’t want to stop everyone and have them repeat things for the camera. In this case though we arrived at O. Meekhun gym to find organized instruction being given to Phetjee Jaa and one of the boys named

This above is a little video help to Benjamin who wrote me about a basic problem he was having in sparring. It seemed like the best way to answer him was in a quick video. I try to help people who write in to me as best I can. Once I filmed it I realized that this is something a lot of others are probably having issues with. I know I still run into it after 3 years here, so I thought to turn it into a “Sylvie’s Tips” video. Hopefully it helps others. Benjamin asked about how his knee

This is a deceptively simple way to close distance. I get interesting communication from readers and fans. When it’s brief, I’ll answer directly. Mostly I try to get folks to post their questions on the Muay Thai Roundtable forum so it can help others who might have the same questions and more people can chime in to help with answers; but in this case the question was one I’ve not only worked hard to develop a strategy on, as a smaller fighter, but it’s also one that I’ve heard a few times. So it makes sense to do a Sylvie’s

Some of My Best Posts

I’ve written before about how Muay Thai and fighting, to me, isn’t “violence.” My argument was that I have experienced real violence, the above is the story of my rape as a child, and that the consent and preparation involved in fighting isn’t the same. There is, however, a flavor of violence in Muay Thai – it is, as my old boxing coach Ray Valez would say, “the hurt business” and ultimately any fighter pushing for the highest form of the art of Muay Thai has to embrace this. Yesterday there was a young woman at my gym, Petchrungruang, who

I just had to do my annual visa run, which requires sitting in a van full of total strangers for the 11 hour drive up to the border with Laos, an overnight stay, then the 11 hour drive back down to Pattaya. It’s grueling. Sitting in a car or a plane for this number of hours takes a toll on anyone. It’s astonishing how tired sitting on your ass makes you. I’m not very social, so I always put as many hours of podcasts and audio books as possible on my player so I can leave my headphones in the

Apologies to my younger readers, this post is laced with profanity. Sometimes profanity has a special power to describe things in ways other words can’t. The plastic stool underneath me is too far out from the actual corner and my body kind of tips backwards as my cornermen lift my legs into their hands and rub icy cold water on my thighs and shins. I try to balance myself on the ropes but it’s more awkward and I reposition my forearms to the tops of my thighs; the cold water is going over my head now, which feels nice because

This article is about the flourishing Muay Thai of Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, becoming the best female fight city in the country and very possibly in the entire world. No other city boasts such a complete native female Thai fight scene: it’s fed by side-bet (gambling) fights in the outlying provinces, stabilized by Sports Schools, hosted at a large number of local stadia (all of which allow women to fight in them) which hold fights every night of the week, and supported by the Thai Muay Siam media coverage. If you are a female Muay Thai fighter, this

Stephan Fox is the General Secretary of the International Federation of Muaythai Amateur (IFMA) and the Vice-President of the World Muaythai Council (WMC). He is a huge figure in the recognition and development of amateur Muaythai in Thailand, as well as international competition with both the IFMA and WMC. After 20 years of work, the International Olympic Committee has just given provisional recognition for possible inclusion in the Olympics – let me repeat that: 20 years of work for that, and Mr. Fox’s response is, “right on schedule.” above, the full 30 minute interview with Stephan Fox We cover a range of

What follows is not authoritative, it is just the things I’ve gleaned in my nearly 5 years of full time training at my various gyms, and in traveling around and taking privates from some of the best in Thailand. You can get access to my growing Muay Thai library with legends for a suggested pledge of $5. I read a rant on Reddit that, despite its intense language, does open up that some people do get frustrated training in Thailand, finding a lack of instruction and padwork that be repetitive. I do believe there is no better place in the

Alex and Note are standing on opposite corners of the ring, wearing shinguards and gloves, hanging out like they’re about to do anything other than sparring. They’re totally relaxed, laughing, joking. Kru Nu is pacing around and there’s a buzz around the circumference of the ring while the remainder of the boys all takes their positions along the ropes as spectators and Goh – one of the padmen for the kids – is hollering for Chicken Man. Kru Nu squats down with his hands on the top rope, peering under the staircase and out into the chicken farm, the most likely

First off, let me say it: weight, its not that big of a deal. There is a strong caveat to this, which is that it is a definite advantage, but so is height, or knowing the scoring system, or fighting since you were 10, or having a fight on your home turf, and so many other things. So while weight is always a potential advantage, it is just one among many possible advantages. You can beat people who have the weight advantage over you, just like you can with any of those other advantages. I know that in the West

read my guest post articles a Husband’s Point of View A Husband’s Point of View – Consider this a working theory. I’ve written about the uniqueness of Thai style training before, in The Slow Cook vs the Hack, and this article can be seen as something of an extension of that. But as Sylvie’s husband watching her progress through very earnest training and a hell of a lot of fighting, and seeing numerous westerners come through her Thai gyms, I’ve come upon something I think is pretty important. What led me to this is a very particular quality many serious

Below is meant to be a helpful guide, something that I wish I had when I first came to training Thailand. These are just things I’ve noticed in my 4 years of training and fighting here and are not hard and fast rules to follow. If you want to be polite in Thailand gyms, in a culture that is different than your own, these are just a few things to look for. There are of course a wide variety of gym experiences in Thailand, and things that are impolite in a small, family Thai-style gym might very well be common

A lot of us feel that aggression comes with an “on/off” switch, and that we should be able to flick it back and forth based on context. Many of us who are learning Muay Thai struggle with aggression, perhaps because we don’t feel that we are “naturally aggressive,” and it’s frustrating to watch those who are seemingly naturally gifted with aggression succeed in ways that we don’t see in ourselves. But aggression isn’t natural, even if it does seem innate in some more than others. I contend that aggression feels natural to some due to having spent years cultivating it before they

First a Little Bit About Daeng Daeng is one of the most fight-focused trainers I’ve trained with. When I was training at Lanna Muay Thai in Chiang Mai, it was Daeng who invested the most in diagnosing and fixing weaknesses in my fighting. He wasn’t my main trainer, but he’s a very good teacher and has a keen eye for finding how to improve on existing strengths and correct errors. I’d initially gotten a bit stuck with a technically brilliant but lazy and unmotivated trainer – that guy was a great trainer for some, just not for me – and Daeng

Join and Study my Muay Thai Library of Legends This is a full video of a private I took with Arjan Surat, Head Coach of the Thai National Team, and owner of the esteemed (but lesser known to the west) Dejrat Gym in Bangkok. I did a short review of the gym when I interviewed female fighter Kaitlin Young, and it was then that I met Arjan Surat for the first time: an absolutely extraordinary teacher and life-force of Muay Thai. The man is Old School-Old School, telling me that he’s been holding pads longer than I’ve been alive (he’s

The Gendered Experience

My hands are shaking as I loosen the laces of my gloves, my fingers pruned and pale from all my sweating. I unwrap and fold the wet strips of linen so that I can hang them up to dry for afternoon training. Normally, Pi Nu is deciding at this point whether we’re going to do some insanely difficult conditioning drill together or scrap it for the morning because he’s too lazy. I’m hoping for the latter. He comes and stands in front of me, kind of watching me silently in this way that he does sometimes, trying to read me…

In addition to being very committed to training and fighting in Muay Thai as much as I can in Thailand, I also have a deep academic root in me and I revel in exploring abstract concepts and concrete facts that help to better understand one’s place and one’s meaning in the world and the liberties awarded and denied through inclusion and exclusion. Unfortunately there is a dearth of academic study of Muay Thai and even less that is produced in English; the articles that have been written are somewhat dispersed and at times hard to find, so below I’ve compiled

the above photo is of my mother and me laying on a mat for hours in the middle of Isaan, under the stars, waiting for my fight to come up on the card For two weeks at the end of October and beginning of November, my parents came out to Thailand for their second visit since I moved here. The first visit was up in Chiang Mai last year and now they came to Pattaya, where we’ve lived since June of this year. My parents loved Chiang Mai. They had mixed feelings about Pattaya. Part of the timing of this

I got the gym a little after 4:00 this afternoon. It had rained heavily for almost an hour and the air was only recently cleared of the heaving movement of wind. Nook was directing two young western men in wrapping their hands and we chatted in broken Thai through different sides of the ring, asking each other whether or not another female fighter from the gym had won her bout the night before. Neither of us had attended the fight and, from what I could understand of Nook’s account of a 20 lbs chicken, he’d probably gone to a cock

Academic author Peter Vail is one of the few serious scholarly writers who have taken on Muay Thai as a field of study. You can find his articles in my Academic Resources post. Besides a general dearth of articles on Muay Thai in English, there is the added problem that they are very hard to find for the average sincere reader who wants to learn more about Muay Thai and Thai culture. Peter Vail’s PhD dissertation is perhaps most significant example of an important work that is largely hidden from western Martial Art readers’ eyes. Academics aren’t interested in Muay

I was having a conversation with an accomplished and very thoughtful female fighter, Mae-Lin Loew of the incredibly well written Loew Factor blog. She was at once applauding me for being so honest and open in my writing, and at the same time kind of wishing she could move more in that direction herself. The subject of social limitations to what might be perceived as self-aggrandizement in blogging came up, and this little portion of my response seemed to stand on its own and say important things, so I duplicate it here: …There’s a lot of sniping and criticism no

OPPRESSED MAJORITY (Majorité Opprimée English), by Eleonore Pourriat I just watched this short movie (10 min) on YouTube, in which the everyday sexism against women is expressed through a reversal in which men are the “oppressed majority.” I write about gender a lot and I suspect a lot of men have a hard time appreciating on a deep level what women experience on a daily basis, mostly because men simply don’t ever experience it. And I do mean on a daily basis – while this movie includes a sexual assault that is not in the day-to-day life of every individual

I’ve written about the bottom rope before (articles at bottom) and this is my response to it coming up again recently. Interestingly, it was reintroduced by an American coach who was saying that his female fighters have always and will always go over the top rope, even in Thailand. Unfortunately, he had some other things to say about why he encourages his fighters to disregard this custom that, to me, smack of a particular racism and sexism that fantasizes about the exploited Thai female body that wasn’t something I could get behind. Firstly, a lot of people in the west

I’ve been called a man twice in the past month – something I’ve experienced many times in Thailand and in the past largely read as a mixed insult or at best a backhanded compliment. It’s not unusual in Thailand for people to make blunt comments about your appearance. But these two have been some of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. I’m not ashamed to be a woman, so what’s with the pride in these two instances, what made the difference? And why were these important to me? The first occasion was at Thapae Stadium in Chiang Mai. The night

Laurie Berenson is a student of Casey VanBrookhoven in New Jersey, USA. While I’ve never met Laurie, she wrote to me through my Facebook Muay Thai page and it turns out we know and have trained with many of the same people (including Casey, who was a favorite sparring partner for me back in Jersey because, despite his being so much bigger than I am, he sparred hard and made me work for anything I landed). When I first heard from Laurie I was taken by how similar her seemingly-instantaneous affinity for Muay Thai was to my own. Once you

Guest Post by Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu There is a very touching piece written by Lindsey Newhall for Fightland: Life of a Pad-Man: A Muay Thai Trainer’s Remorse. The pinnacle of the story is where Dam, a long time pad-man for champions and by most reports a devoted drunk, talks about how he threw the biggest fight of his life and career, because he was told to and you do what you are told…and, because the gym children “needed to eat”: He looked sad, almost defeated. “Okay,” I said to him, “I want you to tell me a story: I want

You can watch my video interview with Angie here. I’m watching Angie smash the pads with Pi Nu. She becomes very still when he tags her legs with kicks – they don’t look hard from here, and they’re definitely not full power, but I’ve been on the receiving end of them and they fucking hurt – but she stays strong. She pauses after the strike, the expression on her face becomes hardened and she comes back with a full-power strike and a grunt, almost a growl, in return. She’s preparing for a fight and she’s serious. Her last fight was

above is my 20 minute video Interview of Frances Watthanaya in Phutthaisong, Buriram – Isaan Read about my trip to Giatbundit Gym in Phutthaisong here. Read about and watch my fight for Giatbundit Gym in Buriram here. Talking with fighter, mother & wife Frances Watthanaya When I first “met” Frances online she was living in Canada and finishing up her degree. She also is a mother to a young, intensely independent, little daughter named Parvati. And she’s a Muay Thai fighter who is married to another Muay Thai fighter and now that she’s finished her degree and the family has